consists of students from the University of
St. Petersburg, and pupils from the Ecole de
Droit (equivalent to our English law
students); and these alumni wear cocked hats
and swords. Some of these days I am certain
the Russian government in its rage for
making everything military will insist upon
the clergy wearing cocked hats and swords;
we shall have the Archbishop of Novgorod
in a shako, and the patriarch Nikon in a
cocked hat. Finally, there are a few Russian
officers, but not guardsmen. Heyde's is uot
aristocratic enough for them; and the Rus
sian officers of the line, though all noble, ex
officio, are as poor as Job.

It is among these motley people that I
begin to see life, and smoke paper cigars, and
play billiards (badly,) and talk indifferent
French and worse German, and a few words
of Russian, at which my acquaintances
laugh. For, I have made acquaintances
already, though no friends.

An acquaintance with whom I have already
adjourned once or twice to the condiment
counter, and whom I am now even attempting
to initiate into the mysteries of the recondite
game of cribbage (our cribbage board is a
sheet of paper in which we stick pins), is a
gentleman whose name, inasmuch as he
holds, I presume, to this day, an official
appointment under the imperial government,
I will veil with the classical pseudonym
of Cato the Censor. Cato is a gross fat
man, an amalgam of puddings, a mountain
of flesh; when I meet him abroad, as I
do sometimes, having twenty-five copecks
worth of droschky, I pity the Ischvostchik,
and the horse, and the droschky springs,
(had they sense to be pitiable) and
(prospectively) Cato the Censor himself, were he
to fall off that ominously oscillating vehicle.
For, who could pick him up again a shattered
fat man ? A crane might do it, or
Archimedes' lever, or a pair of dockyard
shears, but not mortal Boutotsnik or Police-
soldier. When Cato laughs his fat sides
wag; when he sits on one of Heyde's chairs
I tremble for that chair; when he walks
on Heyde's floor, the boards creak with
the agony of this oppression of fat; and
1 expect every moment to see Cato sink
through to the basement as through a trap
door.

Cato the Censor is a Tchinovnik, and
wears a civilian's uniform (that seems a
paradox, but it is not one in a land where
everybody wears a uniform), to wit dark green
with double eagle buttons gilt. When abroad
he wears a long cloak with a cape, and a cap
with a green band, and a curious white and blue
disc in front, half button, half cockade, but
wholly Chinese. I believe it to be competent
for the Tchinovniks to wear, if they choose,
a tunic; but Cato, with the usual fatuity of
fat men, wears a tail coat with the slimmest
and scantiest of tails, the shortest of sleeves
and the tightest of waists. Fat men, properly,
should wear togas; and yet you find
them almost always inveterately addicted to
zephyr jackets. Cato has a round sleek bullet
head, very small feet in the tightest of patent
leather boots— so small that they continually
disturb my notions of the centre of gravity,
and make me fear that, Cato's balance not
being right, he must needs topple over— and
very large, fat, soft beefy bands, whose principal
use and employment we shall presently
discover.

For, why Cato the Censor? Thus much:
that this fat Russian is one of the employés
in the Imperial " Bureau de Censure," (I do
not know, and it would be no use telling
you, its Russian name), and it is his duty
to read through, every morning, every line
of every foreign newspaper that now lies on.
Heyde's table, and to blot out every subversive
article, every democratic paragraph,
every liberal word, every comma or semicolon
displeasing to the autocratic regime
of the Czar of Stickland. For instance,
Heyde's takes in the Illustrated London
News, the Illustrated Times (that other
Times, which is not illustrated, is rigorously
tabooed), the Constitutionnel, the Journal
des Débats, the Brussels Nord, the German.
Illustrieter Zeitung, and that quaint little
Berlinese opuscule the Kladderadatch. These,
with a Hamburg commercial sheet, and
a grim little cohort of St. Petersburg
gazettes and journals, which, for the political
news they contain, might just as well
be sheets of blank paper, are the only
intellectual food we are allowed to consume
at Heyde's. Cato of course knows all
languages; and he goes through these papers
patiently and laboriously, at his own private
bureau in the censor's office. When the
journals have been properly purified, he and
an under-clerk, a sort of garçon de bureau,
bearing the mental food, come down to
Heyde's; the under-clerk deposits the
newspapers on the reading table, liquors at the
condiment counter, and, I am inclined to
think, receives, from time to time, some small
gratuities in the way of copecks, from
Barnabay. He departs, and Cato the Censor,
forgetting, or at least sinking for the time his
official capacity, sinks at once into Cato the
convivialist, and keeps it up till the small
hours, as gaily and persistently as the most
jovial of the Heydians.

Formerly, the censorship of foreign journals
was performed by means of simple excision.
The pruning knife, or rather the axe, as Mr.
Puff would say, was employed; and the
objectionable passages were ruthlessly cut out;
the excised journal presenting, in its
mutilated condition, a lamentable appearance of
raggedness, "windowed," if not looped. You
had to grin through the bars of such a
newspaper, and, knowing that you were in prison,
long for the freedom outside and over the
window. In time, however, some beneficent
minister of police (the censure falls naturally